The Sound Beneath the Skin

The Sound Beneath the Skin


The light should’ve burned me alive. It didn’t. It folded around me instead soft, almost tender, like it knew me. For a heartbeat, I thought maybe this was peace. Then the screaming started.

It wasn’t outside. It was inside. My own voice, multiplied and layered, echoing off walls that didn’t exist. The air was liquid, metallic, pulsing with light that moved like breath. I reached out and my hand split into a hundred shadows, all reaching back.

“Grace.” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Hers. Mine. Ours.

I turned, but there was no floor, no horizon just the endless gleam of fractured glass, reflecting faces I didn’t want to remember. Each one smiled with my mouth. Each one whispered the same word.

“Stay.”

I stumbled backward, breath ragged, and my boots hit something solid. I looked down. The light congealed beneath me, forming a surface that rippled like water. My reflection stared up, eyes hollow and bright.

“You can’t kill what you made,” she said.

“I didn’t make you.”

She smiled. “Didn’t you? Every lie, every wound, every time you said you’d do better and didn’t you built me.”

Her tone was almost gentle, like a confession. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to kill her again. But she looked like me broken in all the same ways.

“Why keep fighting?” she asked. “You could rest here. You could stop running.”

Behind her, something moved slow, deliberate. A shape darker than shadow, spreading like ink through light. The air bent around it.

“Because I’m not done yet,” I said.

Her smile faltered. “You’ll never be done. That’s the curse.”

I grabbed the knife the silver one, still humming and pointed it at her. “Then I’ll curse myself twice.”

The reflection stepped forward. “You can’t fight what’s in your blood.”

“Watch me.”

I lunged. The blade cut through her throat in one clean motion. Light spilled from the wound, brilliant and silent. She didn’t fall. She just smiled wider.

“Grace…” she whispered, voice splintering. “You really don’t get it.”

The world cracked open.

Light turned to storm. The ground beneath me gave way. I fell fast, weightless into black water that swallowed the sound of everything.

When I surfaced, I was somewhere else.

The lake stretched endless under a sick red sky. Bodies floated like driftwood, faces pale, eyes open. Evelyn’s voice echoed faintly across the surface.

“Grace! Where are you?”

I spun around. Nothing. Just water and whispers. My own reflection rippled at my feet, flickering with each breath.

“Evelyn!”

The water rippled again. This time, her voice came from beneath it.

“Grace, help me”

I dove. The cold hit like electricity, needles under the skin. I opened my eyes. The lake was alive full of shapes, memories, ghosts. Evelyn’s hand reached for me, fingers slick with blood.

“Pull me up!” she gasped.

I grabbed her wrist but it wasn’t Evelyn anymore. It was me. Pale. Drowned. Lips blue. Eyes open.

I let go.

The reflection laughed, bubbles spilling from her mouth. “You can’t save her if you can’t save yourself.”

I kicked to the surface, lungs burning. When I broke through, the sky had changed again now gray, now bleeding light through cracks in the clouds. I dragged myself onto a half-sunken dock, gasping.

Footsteps echoed behind me. Soft. Bare.

Evelyn stood at the edge of the dock, soaked and shivering. Her eyes were wild. “Grace… what happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.” She stepped closer. “You went under.”

“So did you.”

Her voice trembled. “I followed you.”

The words hit harder than the fall. She’d come after me into this place, wherever it was.

I stood, legs shaking. “We have to get out.”

She laughed, sharp and broken. “Out? You think there’s an out?”

I froze. Her voice wasn’t right. It bent on the edges.

She stepped into the light, and I saw it silver veins crawling up her neck, eyes glinting with the same metallic shimmer as the knife.

“Evelyn…”

“It’s inside me too,” she whispered. “Your infection. Your gift.”

She reached for me, fingers twitching. “We can end it together.”

I backed away. “You’re not her.”

“Yes, I am.” She smiled. “Or I was. Before you drowned her.”

I raised the knife. “Don’t make me do this.”

Her smile deepened. “You already did.”

The air shifted. The water behind her erupted something rising, enormous, dripping black and silver. Its form was fluid, human and not. The reflection, magnified.

I grabbed Evelyn if that’s what she still was and ran. The dock shattered behind us. The lake boiled. The air filled with the sound of wings wet, heavy, beating out of rhythm.

We stumbled through reeds, mud sucking at our boots. Evelyn screamed, falling to her knees. Her veins pulsed brighter, the glow spreading across her chest.

“Grace it’s burning!”

I knelt beside her, heart hammering. “Fight it.”

She shook her head. “You don’t fight light. You let it in.”

Before I could stop her, she grabbed my wrist and pressed my hand to her chest. The pulse hit like lightning her heartbeat, then mine, then neither. The knife flared in my other hand.

And then I saw it.

Her face splitting into two Evelyn and the reflection, both fighting for space. The thing from the lake stepped closer, its voice layered like a choir of broken glass.

“Choose.”

My throat closed.

Not again.

I looked at Evelyn. Her eyes flickered between blue and silver, pain twisting her features. “Please,” she said. “Don’t let me become her.”

The knife trembled in my grip.

I remembered every choice before this. Every life I’d tried to save and lost. Every version of me that thought she could do better.

I met her gaze. “I won’t.”

She smiled through tears. “Thank you.”

Then I drove the knife through her heart.

The light exploded.

I fell backward, blinded. The air turned molten. Her scream split the sky, and the creature behind her shrieked too same voice, same sound. Both of them burning out in one brilliant flash.

When the light faded, the world was quiet again.

Evelyn was gone. The lake was still. The knife lay beside me, blackened now, no longer glowing.

For a moment, I thought I’d won.

Then I heard the whisper.

Grace.

It came from the water. From beneath the surface, deep and patient.

I stood slowly. The lake rippled once.

And a hand broke through thin, pale, familiar. My hand.

Another followed. Then another. Then dozens, all clawing their way up from the deep. My reflections, my ghosts, all wearing my face.

The horizon bled red again.

I stepped back, heart poundin
g, knowing there was nowhere left to run.

Because this wasn’t the reflection’s world anymore. It was mine.

And they were coming home.